Portside Snapshot - June 13, 2015

The growing app-based service economy relies on legions of underpaid and underprotected contract workers. Today's self-employed workers pay an additional 7.5 percent in income tax and cannot qualify for an earned income tax credit. They have no guarantee of equal protection under laws mandating minimum wages, sick leave or family leave, nor do they have protection against workplace discrimination, harassment or injury, unless they prevail in a lawsuit.

Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking the Democratic nomination, is mixing it up with the media. In a frank give-and-take with reporters, he scolded the media for covering the election like a baseball game. Nobody cares about Gov. Bush's campaign manager, he said, while the GOP has gotten away with murder hiding their agenda.

The “allegedly unstoppable momentum” of the pro-fast-track forces just hit the immovable object called transpartisan grassroots democracy. Now the focus will be on “permanently retiring” the fast-track trade promotion authority process, borne out of the Nixon presidency, and replace it with a more inclusive, transparent process that instead of more job-offshoring can deliver trade deals that create American jobs and raise our wages.

In the second decade of the 21st century, it is high time that the Left rethink what it means to practice internationalism in this new world of collapsing states, extraordinary concentrations of wealth, and technologies that make the U.S.–the one world power, however much in decline—able to track or kill people, anytime and anywhere in the world.

The vote on "Trade Adjustment Act" portion of legislation to allow President Obama to "fast track" the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), failed because Republicans were opposed to giving workers who lose their jobs due to the TPP any additional aid. "Liberal Democrats" voted to kill the TAA bill in order to stop the passage of the TPP, in a Republican controlled House of Representatives.